Can a community torn apart by politics unite to heal? In 'Bucks County, USA,' they try

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Set us as preferred As the nation hurtles toward a pivotal and divisive midterm election, it’s fair to wonder if people on opposite sides of the political spectrum will ever be able to again live peacefully as neighbors, to talk, and especially listen, to each other.It’s a question co-directors Robert May and Barry Levinson and producer Jason Sosnoff set out to answer in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan.6, 2021.

It led to their five-part docuseries, “Bucks County, USA,” now on streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app, that unfolds across four years in a suburban Pennsylvania county being ripped apart by vicious school board battles poisoned by partisan personal conflicts.(The finale streams Sunday, and the full docuseries will air Oct.

29 on SoCal PBS.)“We don’t pay enough attention to one another,” Levinson says.“We just say, ‘I’ve formed my position and I’m locked into it’ and we don’t share enough interaction where we can discuss things.

Democracy requires interactions, and if we cannot find a way to find common ground, that’s my big worry.”The series shows how Paul Martino spent a fortune supporting Republican candidates who supported reopening schools quickly after the height of the pandemic but then, more contentiously, turned their attention to the culture wars.They focused on what was being taught in the classrooms and stocked on the shelves in the school libraries, leaving teachers feeling attacked and Black families and LGBTQ+ students alienated and ostracized.“It’s unexpected how something like that can accelerate into such a contentious situation,” Levinson says, “where well-educated people in a wonderful community can’t figure things out.”May says national polarization is poisoning the atmosphere locally.

“It became a life-or-death battle in the nam...